By John J. Kriz
In a barn tucked behind a quiet house in New Canaan rests a red forty-foot aerial ladder apparatus, retired from its life of protecting New Canaan but meticulously preserved. The apparatus – firefighter-speak for their vehicles – is back on the road when Memorial Day or other charitable community events like the Ice Cream Social roll around — loud, long, gleaming and unmistakably from another time.
Scott Ready owns it. He answers questions about the aerial apparatus with clipped affirmation. “Correct,” he says when asked if it’s his. He bought it and began its restoration in 2002, but that wasn’t the beginning.
Mr. Ready has spent most of his life in and around firehouses. “First I was in New Canaan’s volunteer fire department, which was really our primary fire department until recently. And I went to the rank of Assistant Chief eventually in New Canaan,” he says. His professional work was in Norwalk. “I overlapped my time as a career fireman, a volunteer fireman—career in Norwalk, volunteer in New Canaan. And then I did my time in New Canaan. So overall about 35 years as a fireman.” His family goes back to the Hoyts, who were among the earliest town residents.
He also works as a plumber – his former side gig and now his full-time trade. “I did that the whole time to pay my bills,” he notes. “You don’t make really great money as a fireman. It’s okay money, but you can’t get ahead.”
Finding the ‘Lost’ Aerial Apparatus
The aerial apparatus has a long lineage. “This was the first—not our first hook and ladder, because we did have one that had just regular ladders loaded on it—this is the first hydraulically raised ladder truck,” Mr. Ready explains. Purchased new by the Town of New Canaan for $23,000, the contract was signed in 1946, though the apparatus didn’t arrive until 1949 due to post-war production delays.
“After World War II, there was a backlog of fire apparatus for all the communities because the factories were building military equipment for five years,” he said. The aerial apparatus remained in service until the early 1970s, and was sold to a private collector. It changed hands several times after that.
“It went through about five private collectors,” Mr. Ready recalls. Eventually, he suspected it had made its way back to the region—Orange, Connecticut. “Being in the fire service, I put feelers out through a lot of different departments.” A lead came in. He followed up. “I got the guy’s phone number. I went up and looked at it. Sure enough, I could faintly see ‘New Canaan’ written on the hood through the rust, and I knew I had it.”
“I asked the owner of it for about four years if he was interested in selling it,” Mr. Ready says, making just one ‘ask’ per year. “Didn’t want to bother him… we didn’t want to push him too much and have him turn away from us.”
The turning point came without ceremony. “They notified me with a note in my mailbox that he was trying to get ahold of me,” he recalls. “So I called him up and I figured that’s what the call was. He wanted to sell to a fireman.” The apparatus needed to come home.
The deal came together quickly after that. Mr. Ready drove there and bought it.
Restoration
The restoration of the aerial apparatus was slow and painstaking. It took ten years. “We tore it down and then built it right back up again,” Mr. Ready notes. The hardest part wasn’t mechanical—it was cosmetic. “Getting a painter. Nobody wanted to paint the parts. They want you to roll a car in a garage and roll it back out again. They don’t want to paint things in pieces.” The truck had been disassembled. Each piece was heavy, requiring careful handling. Eventually, a painter agreed to do the work. “It was painted at a residence actually in Norwalk, and this guy was terrific.”
Asked whether it was a labor of love, Mr. Ready doesn’t hesitate. “Totally,” he says. “It was my favorite rig when I was a kid… this is the one that used to come to the schools on Fire Prevention Day.”
Restoration was far from a solo effort, he acknowledges. Other key participants in the restoration’s success were Sven Englund who, like Mr. Ready, is a former assistant New Canaan fire chief, and is current chairman of the town’s Utilities Commission; Mike Tiani, another New Canaan fireman; and Ed Karl, who works at Karl Chevrolet and is a former New Canaan fire chief when the department was mostly volunteer. It was a team.
A true handyman, Mr. Ready’s home shop (remember, he’s a plumber) for his business and maintenance of the apparatus is a master class in good order and cleanliness. The apparatus itself is fully equipped with helmets, boots, hoses, extra ladders, grass fire brooms, power saws, a smoke ejector, a generator, axes, a life net to catch people jumping out of windows – you name it. It looks like it just rolled out of the showroom, prepared for action, with surfaces so clean you could eat off them.
“There’s enough equipment on this truck to actually use it at a fire if you had to. I wanted the truck to look like it was alive,” stresses Mr. Ready, “not a static empty piece of hardware driving around, but it has a life. It’s breathing. There’s men that are working with this truck that are on it, and pretty much the equipment that was on there that would’ve been there in the early 1960s.” He goes on to say, referencing the three men who worked with him on the restoration, “we were all around the same age when we restored this,” going on to note “we wanted to get it back to where our childhood memories had it.”
The aerial apparatus appears occasionally—at parades, shows such as Caffeine & Carburetors and local charitable gatherings. “I might just do a couple spins around town throughout the warm weather,” he says. Though he avoids taking it out in winter due to dangers of corrosive salt, there were exceptions. “I did pick Santa Claus up a few times up at Waveny that came in on the helicopter.”
The barn in which the apparatus is housed is attached to a small Cape Cod house built from a Sears house kit. Yes, even in pre-IKEA times you could buy a ‘build it yourself’ home.
For Scott Ready, Aerial 3’s return to its hometown is more than nostalgia. It’s the culmination of a decades-long effort — a commitment to a piece of New Canaan history, and a kind of unspoken covenant between a veteran firefighter and his favorite rig.
